Information Transmitting and Cognition with a Spiking Neural Network Model

Information encoding plays a crucial role in neuroscience. One of the fundamental questions in cognitive neuroscience is how the brain encodes external stimuli in the sensory cortex. We use a network model based on the Hodgkin–Huxley type to study the information transmitting including its storage and recall. The model is inspired by psychological and neurobiological evidence on sequential memories. The model contains excitatory and inhibitory neurons with all-to-all connections whose architecture has two layers. A lower layer represents consecutive events during the information encoding process, and the upper layer is used to tag sequences of events represented in the lower layer. The spike-timing-dependent plasticity learning rule is used for sequential storage of excitatory connections between the modules. Computer simulations demonstrate that the synchronization status of multiple neurons is dependent on the network connectivity patterns, and also this model has good performance for different sequences of storage and recall. (paper)